Customer Success Trends to look out for in 2023

It’s high time to evangelize the concept of Customer Success and no better timing to do this than at the start of a fresh year. As SaaS companies start to understand the importance of post-sales impact driven by CS, it’s important to have a vision for what the function will look like in 2023. With CS teams restructuring themselves and getting a better understanding of what this function is all about, I’m sure that this year will be an exciting year for Customer Success.

Here are a few things I’m certain we’ll see this year:

A. Customer Success Operations:

Differentiating between onboarding, implementation and support becomes key to defining Customer Success Operations and how they are driven.

• Onboarding: Teams will solely focus on getting the customers up to speed in a timely manner by following the initiatives set by CS Ops.
• Implementation: Teams can then focus on the technicalities that come with setting up a tool and familiarising the customer with the same. For example. – integrations, setting up a workspace as required, defining the communication channel, and so on.
• Support: Teams will then be the front runners in picking up queries and being the voice of your product and eventually the stars of any SaaS company.

CS Ops as a function will be responsible for designing effective metrics, and playbooks and ensuring the implementations happen as designed. Handling a CS platform, analyzing CS data, building initiatives, and driving them across cross-functional teams will be their focus and this is something I am personally very excited about!

B. Customer Community

A customer community is an online or physical space for customers to connect on a regular basis to have conversations, answer questions, and share ideas and information.

We all know how Shopify has built the best online customer community for people to learn from each other. Why waste time on something someone has definitely solved already?

And goes without saying, WeWork has defined for all of us what coming together as a community can bring to the table – peers, ideas, collaboration – and you never know, your next big idea along with your investor?! You just never know.

Building a CS community, whether online or physical is a space we should definitely keep an eye out for. With CS meetups happening and summits starting after being locked in for so long, the thrill of meeting CS folks – I absolutely can’t wait to be a part of such an event and see how CS individuals are thriving while striving to make this vertical a success in their respective organizations.

After all, who wouldn’t mind some advocacy at the end of the day?!

C. CS budgets will increase

Defining your CS functions and a clear demarcation of roles will define the success of your CS vertical and in turn your product. With companies now understanding the importance of CS driving revenue through retention, renewals, and upsells, it is coming to light that pumping in budgets for CS teams is not a topic of debate anymore, it is inevitable.

CS summits, CS meetups, and Key Account Management are some avenues that will see increased budgets because the ROI it will drive will make up for more than the spending.

With the expected economic turmoil, customers will scrutinize outcomes and value more, making CS critical for retention and the first place for new investments.

D. Customer Success platforms will rule the SaaS tech space

A good customer success software centralizes all customer data into a bird’s eye view of the customer. The data might include support tickets, product usage, adoption, downloads, upsells, or other customer signals.

Platforms that are intuitively able to provide all this information to the CS teams are in for a win! Automating a customer journey be it through the help of pre-defined playbooks, seamless onboarding, minimal intervention, and timely reminders is what teams want and are on the lookout for.

CS tools and kits are going to define how tasks are going to be picked up by individuals and in turn help contribute to the CS Operations function that we just spoke about, to effectively and efficiently drive Customer Success.

E. Early adoption of Customer Success

The sooner companies realize how the customer success vertical is structured, the faster it will be for them to bring in best CS practices – defining the team structure, measuring customer success outcomes, setting up playbooks, automating as much of the customer journey making it easy not only for customers to see the value right in front of their eyes, but also keep the CS teams on their toes (in a good way of course!).

A very important metric for us to watch out for and how teams are measuring CS impact is Net Revenue Retention. Defined as the percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a given period (usually monthly or annually). It considers income from upgrades, cross-sales, downgrades, and cancellations. Closely monitoring all data in this regard is something we’re already seeing product-based companies do.

The better we get at defining these metrics for every specific kind of case, the sooner we will see how impactful it is on an organizational level.

At the end of the day, we just want this community to flourish, and how!

I for one, cannot wait to learn, contribute, grow and spread the word about Customer Success and how beautifully it is all going to stitch together in the coming years. It is just a matter of time, until then, watch this space for more as I continue to share my first-hand experience of building Customer Success as a skill for yourself and fast-track your CS career trajectory!